Lauren Berger - Member, Livingston County DSA
Well, here we are.
It has been two years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Heath, when the Supreme Court ruled that Roe v. Wade, court-accepted guidance for 49 years (a fifth of the time that our country has existed), was unconstitutional. For two years, anti-abortion legislatures have ramped up the dictation over the lives of people who can bear children – a paternalistic and violating overreach for people seeking life-and-death medical care. For two years, a country that says we have no right to universal healthcare has also decreed that we have no rights to our own uteruses either.
People have had to flee their home states to seek abortion care – almost 172 thousand in 2023 alone, according to USA Today (and that’s just who made it onto the report). The people who couldn’t afford to travel, or couldn’t take time off work, or didn’t have a ride…those numbers aren’t captured.
For two years, Democrats have been promising they’ll protect abortion – if we stay under their thumbs where we belong. The problem is, they had nearly fifty years to enshrine Roe into federal legislation before 2022, and failed to do so. I know there’s a list of excuses (there always is), but the truth is that trusting “business as usual” politicians is exactly what led us here. I say that not to deflate the hope any of us might still have in our institutions, but to remind us that this is not the time to be complacent.
The Court’s protection for Mifepristone from the other day rings empty and hollow to those who see it realistically, analogous to placing a single band-aid on a collapsing dam. Our lives and our futures are being debated by not medical experts and researchers, but politicians and lobbyists whose foundation on medical knowledge is the King James Bible, the majority of whom haven’t had to consider a potential pregnancy since I’ve been alive. Anti-abortion advocates are not relenting, and neither should we.
How do we remain relentless? Turning out to events like this, give yourselves a round of applause. We relentlessly mobilize against Crisis Pregnancy Centers – the fake clinics like the Pregnancy Resource Center of the Valleys in Mt. Morris and All Babies Cherished here in Batavia that manipulate and guilt people seeking abortion even though do not provide genuine medical care.
We also relentlessly grow our networks and continue learning – look around, are there people here you don’t know yet? Are there resources we can share? The more we learn, the more we understand how our struggles – for abortion access, for racial equity, for disability justice – are all connected. Even today, I haven’t said the word “women” in reference to those who are affected by anti-abortion policies – because abortion restriction affects all genders. We are relentless in our compassion. Our struggles are connected – but so is our liberation. Together, we are stronger. Together, we win.
